Johannesburg, 06 May 2022
A new partnership between Axiz, ExaGrid and Veeam is solving the growing challenge southern African enterprises are facing in backing up increasing data volumes timeously and cost-effectively.
Neill Avenant, Business Development Manager for ExaGrid at Axiz, says enterprises grappling with 25TB to 100s of TBs of data are becoming challenged in completing their daily backups within the overnight backup windows. “They are finding it harder to complete backups without overrunning the backup window, so they are having to do incomplete backups or delay backups, resulting in data loss and compliance risks,” he says. “This problem is becoming worse as data volumes increase.”
He explains that until fairly recently, organisations deployed normal storage devices for this task, but that these are not up to the challenge of handling exponentially increased data volumes. Last year, a partnership was formed between Veeam and ExaGrid to address these challenges, offering a combined solution that enables customers to increase the performance of their backup infrastructure while reducing data storage and complexity to meet their data backup goals via a high performance, flexible and scalable architecture.
Avenant says ExaGrid and Veeam integrate perfectly, ensuring efficient data backup with the proper retention periods, as well as sizing tools to ensure customers don’t over- or under-provision. They have exactly the right capacity with space for growth, and thanks to remote monitoring, they can also proactively add additional capacity in time.”
There are five key benefits where ExaGrid and Veeam help customers more effectively manage their data:
1. Cost avoidance
Legacy backup solutions can be costly. ExaGrid, together with Veeam, offers customers a cost-effective solution that results in significant savings over traditional backup technologies. ExaGrid’s innovative tiered backup storage architecture with a front-end disk-cache landing zone where data is backed up to directly for fast backup and restore performance and then deduplicates to a repository tier that provides storage savings and lowers costs for longer-term retention. ExaGrid also offers simple deployment and ease of use, along with the elimination of forklift upgrades, and planned product obsolescence allows for a lower overall cost of ownership.
2. Simplicity
The ExaGrid and Veeam joint solution is designed to be easy to use and does not require any specialised training or professional services. Most of the processes are simple “point and click” and run automatically once configured. The goal is to make backup simple and allow a general IT person to perform such tasks.
3. Predictable performance
ExaGrid, together with Veeam, have collaborated to focus on providing the best possible performance across backup performance, restore/VM performance and data growth management performance. Because ExaGrid has integrated the Veeam Data Mover, Veeam synthetic full backups can be created at a rate that is six times faster than legacy storage solutions. In addition, Veeam writes directly to the ExaGrid Landing Zone, a front-end disk cache, avoiding the performance bottleneck of inline deduplication. ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture includes not only disk, but also memory, bandwidth and processing power – all the elements needed to maintain high backup performance and to scale as data needs grow.
4. Scalability
When an ExaGrid system needs to expand, additional appliances are simply attached to the existing scale-out system. This allows for a fixed length backup window as data grows and allows the system to maintain all the aspects of performance as the amount of data grows, with customers paying for what they need when they need it. In addition, as new ExaGrid appliances are added to the existing system, ExaGrid automatically load balances available repository capacity, maintaining a virtual pool of storage that is shared across the system. As data grows in size, ExaGrid doubles, triples and quadruples the processor, memory, bandwidth and disk to help customers maintain a fixed-length backup window.
5. Flexibility
The joint ExaGrid and Veeam solution offers customers the flexibility to:
- Retain data on-site, off-site at a second data centre, off-site in a third-party managed cloud or public cloud;
- Leverage physical cross-replication with up to 16 worldwide major data centres in a group;
- Backup directly using SQL dumps or Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN); and
- Maintain the ability to have a hybrid cloud approach to data management and backup.
Avenant says Axiz is now appointing reseller partners across the SADC region to deploy the ExaGrid and Veeam solutions. “We are seeing strong interest from public and private sector enterprises as they approach the 25TB – 30TB sweet spot where they need better data backup and storage solutions,” he says.
For more information about becoming a reseller partner or implementing ExaGrid and Veeam, e-mail at09-exagrid@axiz.com.
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